less the poet of the universe than of the individual, and thus to rob him of the real supremacy which his fruitful imagination seemed to promise. His ideals are false to genuine nobility. He could never metamorphose himself into another. There is in all his personages an essential sameness,― men proud and moody, cynical and defiant; women devoted and loving, but unreasoning and instinctive, with the latent fury of the tigress. In all his dramas the central figure is himself, persisting in his eternal monologue. The varieties are varieties of situation and costume.

He called himself the grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme.' But we have left his point of view behind us. Man is not an abortion. Life is not a farce. The business of poetry is not revolt mainly. Much has been rejected as worthless, passing with the restless, feverish conditions which gave it birth. Much can perish only with the English language. So felt the unhappy Byron:

My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire,
And my frame perish even in conquering pain;
But there is that within me which shall tire
Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire.'

Character. Never was literature so intensely subjective. Never did a man so clearly impress upon his work his own glory and his own condemnation. Over all are thrown the sable hues of his master-mood, the gloomy humor of a mighty and sensitive spirit, madly and vainly struggling to break through its enclosure, then recoiling upon itself to find stability in universal scepticism:

We wither from our youth, we gasp away,
Sick; sick; unfound the boon, unslaked the thirst,
Though to the last, in verge of our decay,

Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first;

But all too late; so are we doubly curst.

Love, fame, ambition, avarice; 'tis the same,

Each idle, and all ill, and none the worst;

For all are meteors with a different name,

And Death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.'

Joy is a bubble.

Wretchedness is the common destiny. All

rush to their doom. Some are wrecked earlier, others later:

There is an order

Of mortals on the earth who do become
Old in their youth, and die ere middle age,
Without the violence of warlike death.
Some perishing of pleasure, some of study,
Some worn with toil, some of mere weariness,

Some of disease, and some of insanity,
And some of withered or of broken hearts;
For this last is a malady which slays
More than are numbered in the lists of fate,
Taking all shapes and bearing many names.'

This genius was born long ago, its root in the Northern Scald, predisposed to the sad and sombre, revelling in dread images of desolation:

When I have looked on some face that I love, imagination has often figured the changes that Death must one day produce on it, the worm rioting on lips now smiling, the features and hues of health changed to the livid and ghastly tints of putrefaction; and the image, conjured up by my fancy, but which is as true as it is a fearful anticipation of what must arrive, has left an impression for hours that the actual presence of the object, in all the bloom of health, has not been able to banish: this is one of my pleasures of imagination.'

A volcanic nature is everywhere manifest in his life and utterHe was a rudderless vessel, tossed about by every breeze of desire, on every wave of passion, impelled to ruin by his own

ance.

fateful energy. Be it so. 'I will work the mine of my youth

to the last vein of the ore, and then,-good night.' Restlessness, the relish of excitement, the craving for strife, are at once the propelling and limiting force of his art:

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all,-and publishing also the continuance of the same object, by the action it affords to the mind, which else recoils upon itself."

To a mind thus driven and whirled, yet hedged, life could be only fever and torture. This is the confession wrung from him:

"The worm, the canker, and the grief

Are mine alone!

The fire that on my bosom preys

Is lone as some volcanic isle;

No torch is kindled at its blaze,
A funeral pile!'

But in the wind-sped clouds are momentary rents which reveal the elysium of repose and the heaven of his yearning. His love of nature was passionate, thoughtful, and imaginative. His perceptions of beauty were exquisitely delicate. Passages like the following lace with light and stud with stars the gloom of his meditations:

'And when, at length, the mind shall be all free
From what it hates in this degraded form,
Reft of its carnal life, save what shall be
Existent happier in the fly and worm,-
When elements to elements conform,
And dust is as it should be, shall I not

Himself vicious, he lashed vice in others with bitterness of invective. Aspiring after excellence, he was practically enslaved to vice. In short, he was an assemblage of clashing qualities, an extraordinary mixture of the seraph and the beast. We cannot

but say of him, with mournful regret:

"This should have been a noble creature: he

Hath all the energy which would have made

A goodly frame of glorious elements,

Had they been wisely mingled; as it is,

It is an awful chaos-light and darkness,

And mind and dust, and passions and pure thoughts,
Mix'd and contending, without end or order,

All dormant or destructive.'

Influence. He flooded forth good and evil impetuously. Much that he wrote is licentious in tone; some of it is openly obscene. Worse still, he holds up to admiration moral monsters in whom 'one virtue is linked with a thousand crimes.' The mean and corrupt are made attractive by clothing them in a blaze of diction, or by associating them with images of beauty and sublimity. Virtue is often disparaged, and dignity is conferred on vice. Doubtless, personal hatreds, bitter and reckless moods, frequently prompted him to say what he did not believe or feel. Accused, for example, of thinking ill of women, he replied:

'If I meet a romantic person, with what I call a too exalted opinion of women, I have a peculiar satisfaction in speáking lightly of them; not out of pique to the sex, but to mortify their champion; as I always conclude, that when a man overpraises women, he does it to convey the impression of how much they must have favored him, to have won such gratitude towards them; whereas there is such an abnegation of vanity in a poor devil's decrying women,-it is such a proof positive that they never distinguished him, that I can overlook it.'

As we have seen, side by side with this alluring Dead-sea fruit,—

'Which tempts the eye

But turns to ashes on the lip,'

are the fruits of the spirit,-beauty, loveliness, aspiration, pity, faith, hope, charity. Byron will always have charms for active, restless youth; and will ever find an echo in the breast of voiceless suffering. We shall not venture to pronounce on the general tendency of his writings. In that fadeless garden, flowers and weeds are commingled; in that eternal spring the waters are both salubrious and noxious.

How much does the man of great poetic genius or eloquence owe to mankind! If he sing not the highest word of joy or woe, how great is his remissness! If he dedicate his pen to lust and wine, to ribald mock and scoff, it is the greatest charity that can say to him, 'Neither do I condemn thee; go and sin no more.' The glory that burns around the brow of the Nazarene, so that we see him two thousand years off, was the birth of this thought -The Son of Man has come to save that which is lost.'

DIFFUSIVE PERIOD.

CHAPTER VI.

FEATURES.

On, like the comet's way, through infinite space,
Stretches the long untravelled path of light,
Into the depths of ages.-Bryant.

Politics.-Legislative measures are but temporary expedients. Because times are progressive, institutions must change. The Act of 1832 came to be regarded by many as a mere instalment of justice. Further expansion was demanded, and the advocacy of reform was no longer attended with personal risk. The agitators grew into a formidable party. The chief were extreme Liberals, the 'Chartists.' Vast meetings were held, at one of which two hundred thousand persons were computed to be present A monster petition, bearing more than a million names, was rolled into Parliament in a huge tub. Six points were embodied, most of which, in whole or in part, have since been incorporated in British law: universal suffrage; annual parliaments; secret voting,-vote by ballot; abolition of the property qualification for a seat in the House of Commons; payment of members; equal electoral districts. In 1846 the Corn Law, the key-stone of the protective system, was repealed. Free Trade was soon adopted in every department of commerce, and for nearly forty years the commercial policy of Britain has accepted the maxim,—‘Buy in the cheapest market, and sell in the dearest.' Among later political achievements are the disestablishment and disendowment of the Irish Protestant Church, and the abolition of all religious tests for admission to office or for university degrees.

Evidently England in this era has entered upon the victories of peace. The only war which properly recalls the battleperiod of her history was the Crimean, waged with Russia in defence of Turkey. Insular security and national sense have left